“We’d been getting a battering about how polished we sounded. So we started to search for a little more earthiness”: How a hard rock band who made Johnny Rotten “jump around like a lunatic” made a gritty 70s classic – and caused uproar with the cover

Foreigner got off to a flying start. When British guitarist Mick Jones put the band together in New York City in 1976, he knew exactly what he was doing. With an Anglo-American line-up, including singer Lou Gramm, from Rochester, 250 miles from New York, having a rich, soulful voice reminiscent of Paul Rodgers, this was a hard rock band made for radio.

Their debut album, titled simply Foreigner, released in 1977, sold four million copies in the US. The following year’s Double Vision did a million more. Foreigner even found an unlikely fan in John Lydon, the former Sex Pistols singer, who said that Hot Blooded, the muscular hit from Double Vision, made him “jump around like a lunatic”.

But still, there was something needling Mick Jones. “We’d been getting a battering in the press about how polished the albums sounded,” he said. “So we started to search for a little more earthiness.”

As a result, the directive for Head Games was, in Jones’s words, “more of a ‘street-sounding’ album”. And while it was another big hit, it also turned out to be the most controversial record of Foreigner’s career.

There were two new guys on the team. After original bassist Ed Gagliardi was fired, in came Rick Wills, who had played for David Gilmour, Roxy Music and Peter Frampton.

The other new face was the producer, Roy Thomas Baker, who had worked with Queen on landmark albums such as Sheer Heart Attack and A Night At The Opera. More significant, for Jones, were two records Baker had produced in 1978: Queen’s Jazz, on which the band’s flamboyance was channelled into tighter, punchier songs, and The Cars’ self-titled debut, a perfect synthesis of hard rock and new wave.

With Baker as co-producer on Head Games, alongside Jones and second guitarist/keyboard player Ian McDonald, there was now a different edge to the Foreigner sound.

They played it pretty straight on the album’s title track, an anthem typical of what Jones called “that guitar/synth power rock that we developed”, but the opening track and lead single Dirty White Boy, a fast-paced, lean and mean rock’n’roll number, had the grittiness that Jones was looking for. “It’s just riffs and a great lyric from Lou,” Jones said. “Lou could provide that Americana/street thing.”

And in Women there was a frantic energy – a spiky new-wave feel in the music, and toughness in how Gramm portrayed his subject: ’Women that stab you in the back with a switchblade knife.’

Foreigner - Dirty White Boy (Official Music Video) - YouTube

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It was the album’s cover that sparked controversy: a provocative image of a teenage girl, in a skimpy top, mini-skirt and heels, scrawling graffiti in a men’s toilet. “In the Midwest, record distributors decided they didn’t want to carry the album,” Jones recalled. “But it kind of felt good. We were the bad boys all of a sudden.”

But that feeling would not last. Head Games, released on September 11, 1979, made No.5 in the US after Dirty White Boy had blasted to No.12. But when the album sold two million – disappointing by Foreigner’s high standards – Jones knew it was time to push on again.

What followed with 4, co-produced by Mutt Lange, was the sophisticated sound that made Foreigner one of the biggest rock acts of the next decade. The raw ‘street’ vibe of Head Games was a one-off for Foreigner. So too, wisely, was that dreadful cover.

Originally published in Classic Rock issue 263 (May 2019)